The Paris-based OECD is particularly bad on fiscal policy and it is infamous for its efforts to prop up Europe’s welfare states by hindering tax competition.

It even has a relatively new “BEPS” project that is explicitly designed so that politicians can grab more money from corporations.

So it’s safe to say that the OECD is not a hotbed of libertarian thought on tax policy, much less a supporter of pro-growth business taxation.

Which makes it all the more significant that it just announced that supporters of free markets are correct about the Laffer Curve and corporate tax rates.

The OECD doesn’t openly acknowledge that this is the case, of course, but let’s look at key passages from a Tuesday press release.

Taxes paid by companies remain a key source of government revenues, especially in developing countries, despite the worldwide trend of falling corporate tax rates over the past two decades… In 2016, corporate tax revenues accounted for 13.3% of total tax revenues on average across the 88 jurisdictions for which data is available. This figure has increased from 12% in 2000. …OECD analysis shows that a clear trend of falling statutory corporate tax rates – the headline rate faced by companies – over the last two decades. The database shows that the average combined (central and sub-central government) statutory tax rate fell from 28.6% in 2000 to 21.4% in 2018.

So tax rates have dramatically fallen but tax revenue has actually increased. I guess many of the self-styled experts are wrong on the Laffer Curve.

Let’s take a more detailed look at the data. Here’s a chart from the OECD showing how corporate rates have dropped just since 2000. Pay special attention to the orange line, which shows the rate for developed nations.

And the chart only tells part of the story. The average corporate rate for OECD nations was 48 percent back in 1980.

In other words, tax rates have fallen by 50 percent in the developed world.

Yet if you look at this chart, which I prepared using the OECD’s own data, it shows that revenues actually have a slight upward trend.

I’ll close with a caveat. The Laffer Curve is very important when looking at corporate taxation, but that doesn’t mean it has an equally powerful impact when looking at other taxes.

It all depends on how sensitive various taxpayers are to changes in tax rates.

Business taxes have a big effect because companies can easily choose where to invest and how much to invest.

The Laffer Curve also is very important when looking at proposals (such as the nutty idea from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) to increase tax rates on the rich. That’s because upper-income taxpayers have a lot of control over the timing, level, and composition of business and investment income.

But changes in tax rates on middle-income earners are less likely to have a big effect because most of us get a huge chunk of our compensation from wages and salaries. Similarly, changes in sales taxes and value-added taxes are unlikely to have big effects.

Increasing those taxes is still a bad idea, of course. I’m simply making the point that not all tax increases are equally destructive (and not all tax cuts generate equal amounts of additional growth).

The bad news is that Democrats in the House of Representatives already are pushing for a big increase in the corporate rate.

Rep. John Yarmuth, the new House Budget chairman, said his chamber’s budget blueprint will aim to claw back lost revenue by boosting the corporate tax rate from its current 21 percent to as high as 28 percent… he anticipates the budget resolution will envision changes to the 2017 GOP tax overhaul, including raising the corporate tax rate above its current 21 percent. “…We’ll see how much revenue we can get out of it.” The rate was 35 percent before it was cut in the GOP tax bill.

Since Republicans control the Senate and Trump is in the White House, there’s probably no short-term risk of a higher corporate tax rate.

But such an initiative could be a major threat after the 2020 election, so let’s augment our collection of evidence showing why a higher rate would be a very bad idea.

We’ll start with some analysis from the number crunchers at the Tax Foundation.

A corporate tax rate that is more in line with our competitors reduces the incentives for firms to realize their profits in lower-tax jurisdictions and encourages companies to invest in the United States. Raising the corporate income tax rate would dismantle the most significant pro-growth provision in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and carry significant economic consequences. …Raising the corporate income tax rate would reduce economic growth, and lead to a smaller capital stock, lower wage growth, and reduced employment. …Raising the rate to 25 percent would reduce GDP by more than $220 billion and result in 175,700 fewer jobs.

Here’s the table showing the negative effect of a 22 percent rate and a 25 percent rate, so a bit of extrapolation will give you an idea of how the economy will suffer with a 28 percent rate.

By the way, since the adverse impact on wages is one of the main reasons to be against a higher corporate tax rate, I’ll also share this helpful flowchart from the article.

Now let’s look at some research from China, which underscores the importance of low rates if we want more innovation.

Here’s the unique set of data that created an opportunity for the research.

In November 2001, China implemented a tax collection reform on all manufacturing firms established on or after January 2002, which switched the collection of corporate income taxes from the local tax bureau to the state tax bureau. After the reform, similar firms established before or after 2002 could pay very different effective tax rates because of the differences in the management and incentives of those two types of tax bureaus…, resulting in a reduction of effective corporate income tax rates by almost 10% among newly established firms. …the policy change created exogenous variations in the effective tax rate among similar firms established before versus after 2002. We can thus apply a regression discontinuity design (RD) and use the generated variation in the effective tax rate to identify the impact of taxes on firm innovation.

And here are the findings.

Our analysis yields several interesting results. First, we show a strong and robust causal relationship between tax rate and firm innovation. Decreasing the effective tax rate by one standard deviation (0.01) increases the average number of patent application by a significant 5.7% (see Figure 2 for the graphical evidence). The reform also stimulated R&D expenditures and increased the skilled-labour ratio by 14%. Second, a lower tax rate also improves the quality of patents. The impact of tax reform on patent applications mainly comes from its effect on invention and utility patents – decreasing the effective tax rate by one standard deviation improves the probability of having an invention patent application by 4.4% and increases the number of utility patent applications by 4.7%.

Here’s a chart from the study, showing the difference in patents between higher-taxed firms and lower-taxed firms.

Last but not least, let’s review some of the findings from a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

We present new data on effective corporate income tax rates in 85 countries in 2004. …In a cross-section of countries, our estimates of the effective corporate tax rate have a large adverse impact on aggregate investment, FDI, and entrepreneurial activity. For example, a 10 percent increase in the effective corporate tax rate reduces aggregate investment to GDP ratio by 2 percentage points. Corporate tax rates are also negatively correlated with growth, and positively correlated with the size of the informal economy. The results are robust to the inclusion of controls for other tax rates, quality of tax administration, security of property rights, level of economic development, regulation, inflation, and openness to trade

Let’s focus on the third item. I don’t like special preferences in the tax code because it’s bad for growth when the tax code lures people into misallocating their labor and capital. Ethanol, for instance, shows how irrational decisions are subsidized by the IRS.

Moreover, I’d rather have smart and capable people in the private sector focusing how to create wealth instead of spending their time figuring out how to manipulate the internal revenue code.

That’s why, in my semi-dream world, I’d like to see a flat tax.* Not only would there be a low rate and no double taxation, but there also would be no distortions.

And I’m also happy that lower tax rates are an indirect way of reducing the value of loopholes and other preferences.

To understand the indirect benefits of low tax rates, consider this new report from the Washington Post. Unsurprisingly, we’re discovering that a less onerous death tax means less demand for clever tax lawyers.

A single aging rich person would often hire more than a dozen people — accountants, estate administrators, insurance agents, bank attorneys, financial planners, stockbrokers — to make sure they paid as little as possible in taxes when they died. But David W. Klasing, an estate tax attorney in Orange County, Calif., said he’s seen a sharp drop in these kinds of cases. The steady erosion of the federal estate tax, shrunk again by the Republican tax law last fall, has dramatically reduced the number of Americans who have to worry about the estate tax — as well as work for those who get paid to worry about it for them, Klasing said. In 2002, about 100,000 Americans filed estate tax returns to the Internal Revenue Service, according to the IRS. In 2018, only 5,000 taxpayers are expected to file these returns… “You had almost every single tax professional trying to grab as much of that pot as they could,” Klasing said. “Now almost everybody has had to find other work.”

Needless to say, I’m delighted that these people are having to “find other work.”

By the way, I’m not against these people. They were working to protect families from an odious form of double taxation, which was a noble endeavor.

I’m simply stating that I’m glad there’s less need for their services.

Charles “Skip” Fox, president of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel, said he frequently hears of lawyers shifting their focus away from navigating the estate tax, and adds that there has been a downturn in the number of young attorneys going into the estate tax field. Jennifer Bird-Pollan, who teaches the estate tax to law students at the University of Kentucky, said that nearly a decade ago her classes were packed with dozens of students. Now, only a handful of students every so often may be interested in the subject or pursuing it as a career. “There’s about as much interest in [the class] law and literature,” Pollan said. “The very, very wealthy are still hiring estate tax lawyers, but basically people are no longer paying $1,000 an hour for advice about this stuff. They don’t need it.”

Though I am glad one lawyer is losing business.

Stacey Schlitz, a tax attorney in Nashville, said when she got out of law school about a decade ago roughly 80 percent of her clients were seeking help with their estate taxes. Now, less than 1 percent are, she said, adding that Tennessee’s state inheritance tax was eliminated by 2016. “It is disappointing that this area of my business dried up so that such a small segment of society could get even richer,” Schlitz said in an email.

I hope every rich person in Nashville sees this story and steers clear of Ms. Schlitz, who apparently wants her clients to be victimized by government.

Now let’s shift to the business side of the tax code and consider another example showing why lower tax rates produce more sensible behavior.

US investment in Ireland declined by €45bn ($51bn) in 2017, in another sign that sweeping tax reforms introduced by US president Donald Trump have impacted the decisions of American multinational companies. …Economists have been warning that…Trump’s overhaul of the US tax code, which aimed to reduce the use of foreign low-tax jurisdictions by US companies, would dent inward investment in Ireland. …In November 2017, Trump went so far as to single out Ireland, saying it was one of several countries that corporations used to offshore profits. “For too long our tax code has incentivised companies to leave our country in search of lower tax rates. It happens—many, many companies. They’re going to Ireland. They’re going all over,” he said.

Incidentally, I’m a qualified fan of Ireland’s low corporate rate. Indeed, I hope Irish lawmakers lower the rate in response to the change in American law.

Today’s lesson is simply that lower tax rates reduce incentives to engage in tax planning. I’ll close with simple thought experiment showing the difference between a punitive tax system and reasonable tax system.

60 percent tax rate – If you do nothing, you only get to keep 40 cents of every additional dollar you earn. But if you find some sort of deduction, exemption, or exclusion, you increase your take-home pay by an additional 60 cents. That’s a good deal even if the tax preference loses 30 cents of economic value.

20 percent tax rate – If you do nothing, you get to keep 80 cents of every dollar you earn. With that reasonable rate, you may not even care about seeking out deductions, exemptions, and exclusions. And if you do look for a tax preference, you certainly won’t pick one where you lose anything close to 20 cents of economic value.

The bottom line is that lower tax rates are a “two-fer.” They directly help economic growth by increasing incentives to earn income and they indirectly help economic growth by reducing incentives to engage in inefficient tax planning.

The folks who do like pro-growth tax policy and thus claim that every tax cut will “pay for itself” because of faster growth.

Which was my message in this clip from a recent interview.

For all intents and purposes, I’m Goldilocks in the debate over the Laffer Curve. Except instead of stating that the porridge is too hot or too cold, my message is that it is that changes in tax policy generally lead to more taxable income, but the growth in income is usually not enough to offset the impact of lower tax rates.

In other words, some revenue feedback but not 100 percent revenue feedback.

Yes, some tax cuts do pay for themselves. But they tend to be tax cuts on people (such as investors and entrepreneurs) who have a lot of control over the timing, level, and composition of their income.

And, as I said in the interview, I think the lower corporate tax rate will have substantial supply-side effects (see here and here for evidence). This is because a business can make big changes in response to a new tax law, whereas people like you and me don’t have the same flexibility.

But I don’t want this column to be nothing but theory, so here’s a news report from Estonia on the Laffer Curve in action.

After Estonia raised its alcohol excise tax rates considerably in 2017, Estonian daily Postimees has estimated that the target of the money the alcohol excise tax would bring into state coffers could have been missed by at least EUR 40 million. …Initially, in the state budget of 2017, the ministry had been planned that proceeds from the alcohol excise tax would bring EUR 276.4 million, but last summer, it cut the forecast to EUR 237.5 million.

The fact that most tax increases produce more revenue is definitely not an argument in favor of higher tax rates.

That argument is wrong in part because government already is far too large. But it’s also wrong because we should consider the health and vitality of the private sector. Here’s some of what I wrote about some academic research in 2012.

…this study implies that the government would reduce private-sector taxable income by about $20 for every $1 of new tax revenue. Does that seem like good public policy? Ask yourself what sort of politicians are willing to destroy so much private sector output to get their greedy paws on a bit more revenue. What about capital taxation? According to the second chart, the government could increase the tax rate from about 40 percent to 70 percent before getting to the revenue-maximizing point. But that 75 percent increase in the tax rate wouldn’t generate much tax revenue, not even a 10 percent increase. So the question then becomes whether it’s good public policy to destroy a large amount of private output in exchange for a small increase in tax revenue. Once again, the loss of taxable income to the private sector would dwarf the new revenue for the political class.

The bottom line is that I don’t think it’s a good trade to reduce the private sector by any amount simply to generate more money for politicians.

But the professional economists who work for the OECD are much better than the political appointees who push a statist agenda.

So when I saw that three of them (Oguzhan Akgun, David Bartolini, and Boris Cournède) produced a study estimating the relationship between tax rates and tax revenues, I was very curious to see the results.

They start by openly acknowledging that high tax rates can backfire.

This paper investigates the capacity of governments to raise revenue by assessing the ways in which tax receipts respond to rates… Revenue returns from tax increases can be expected to decrease with the level of tax rates, because higher rates exacerbate disincentives to produce and raise incentives to avoid taxation. These two main channels can therefore imply that tax receipts rise less than proportionately with rates and may peak at a given point.

Trade openness is found to reduce CIT revenue. The latter is consistent with…international tax competition, which is likely to increase the effects of tax rates on the location of firms or more broadly of their profit-generating activities.

Sadly, the political types at the OECD have a “BEPS” scheme that is designed to curtail tax competition.

But let’s not digress. Here’s another remarkable admission in the study. The OECD economists point out that it is not a good idea for governments to try to maximize revenue.

Estimates of revenue-maximising rates should not be seen as policy objectives or recommendations, as they imply high levels of economic distortions or tax avoidance.

Amen. I cited a study in 2012 showing that a revenue-maximizing tax rate might destroy as much as $20 of private sector output for every $1 collected by government. Only Bernie Sanders would think that’s a good deal.

Last but not least, the study even points out a class-warfare approach is misguided when looking at personal income taxes.

More progressive broadly defined personal income taxes generally yield more revenue, but very strong progressivity is associated with lower revenue.

…taxes…affect the decisions of households to save, supply labour and invest in human capital, the decisions of firms to produce, create jobs, invest and innovate, as well as the choice of savings channels and assets by investors. What matters for these decisions is not only the level of taxes but also the way in which different tax instruments are designed and combined to generate revenues…investigating how tax structures could best be designed to promote economic growth is a key issue for tax policy making. … this study looks at consequences of taxes for both GDP per capita levels and their transitional growth rates.

For all intents and purposes, the economists at the OECD wanted to learn more about how taxes distort the quantity and quality of labor and capital, as illustrated by this flowchart from the report.

Here are the main findings (some of which I cited, in an incidental fashion, back in 2014).

The reviewed evidence and the empirical work suggests a “tax and growth ranking” with recurrent taxes on immovable property being the least distortive tax instrument in terms of reducing long-run GDP per capita, followed by consumption taxes (and other property taxes), personal income taxes and corporate income taxes. …relying less on corporate income relative to personal income taxes could increase efficiency. …Focusing on personal income taxation, there is also evidence that flattening the tax schedule could be beneficial for GDP per capita, notably by favouring entrepreneurship. …Estimates in this study point to adverse effects of highly progressive income tax schedules on GDP per capita through both lower labour utilisation and lower productivity… a reduction in the top marginal tax rate is found to raise productivity in industries with potentially high rates of enterprise creation. …Corporate income taxes appear to have a particularly negative impact on GDP per capita.”

Here’s how the study presented the findings. I might quibble with some of the conclusions, but it’s worth noting all the minuses in the columns for marginal tax, progressivity, top rates, dividends, capital gains, and corporate tax.

This is all based on data from relatively prosperous countries.

A new study from the International Monetary Fund, which looks at low-income nations rather than high-income nations, reaches the same conclusion.

The average tax to GDP ratio in low-income countries is 15% compared to that of 30% in advanced economies. Meanwhile, these countries are also those that are in most need of fiscal space for sustainable and inclusive growth. In the past two decades, low-income countries have made substantial efforts in strengthening revenue mobilization. …what is the most desirable tax instrument for fiscal consolidation that balances the efficiency and equity concerns. In this paper, we study quantitatively the macroeconomic and distributional impacts of different tax instruments for low-income countries.

It’s galling that the IMF report implies that there’s a “need for fiscal space” and refers to higher tax burdens as “strengthening revenue mobilization.”

But I assume some of that rhetoric was added at the direction of the political types.

The economists who crunched the numbers produced results that confirm some of the essential principles of supply-side economics.

…we conduct steady state comparison across revenue mobilization schemes where an additional tax revenues equal to 2% GDP in the benchmark economy are raised by VAT, PIT, and CIT respectively. Our quantitative results show that across the three taxes, VAT leads to the least output and consumption losses of respectively 1.8% and 4% due to its non-distorting feature… Overall, we find that among the three taxes, VAT incurs the lowest efficiency costs in terms of aggregate output and consumption, but it could be very regressive… CIT, on the other hand, though causes larger efficiency costs, but has considerable better inequality implications. PIT, however, deteriorates both the economic efficiency and equity, thus is the most detrimental instrument.

Here’s the most important chart from the study. It shows that all taxes undermine prosperity, but that personal income taxes (grey bar) and corporate income tax (white bar) do the most damage.

I’ll close with two observations.

First, these two studies are further confirmation of my observation that many – perhaps most – economists at international bureaucracies generate sensible analysis. They must be very frustrated that their advice is so frequently ignored by the political appointees who push for statist policies.

Second, some well-meaning people look at this type of research and conclude that it would be okay if politicians in America imposed a value-added tax. They overlook that a VAT is bad for growth and are naive if they think a VAT somehow will lead to lower income tax burdens.

Last year’s corporate tax cut is reducing U.S. tax collections, as expected. But that change is likely to ripple far beyond the country’s borders in the years ahead, shrinking other countries’ tax revenue… The U.S. tax law will reduce what other countries collect from multinational corporations by 1.6% to 13.5%… Companies will be more likely to put profits and real investment in the U.S. than they were before the U.S. lowered its corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, according to the paper. That will leave fewer corporate profits for other countries to tax. And as that happens, other countries are likely to chase the U.S. by lowering their corporate tax rates, too, creating the potential for what critics have called a race to the bottom. …Mexico, Japan and the U.K. rank near the top of the paper’s list of countries likely to lose revenue… Corporate tax rates steadily declined over the past few decades as countries competed to attract investment.

Ever since Donald Trump last year unveiled deep tax cuts for companies in America, German industry has been wracked with fears over the economic fallout. …“In the long term, Germany cannot afford to have a higher tax burden than other countries,” warned Monika Wünnemann, a tax specialist at German business federation BDI. …the BDI urges Berlin to cut the overall tax burden, including corporate and trade levies, to a maximum 25 percent, compared to 26 percent in the US. …tax competition has clearly heated up within the European Union: France plans to reduce its top corporate rate to 25 percent by 2022 from 34 percent. The UK wants to cut its rate to 17 percent by 2021 from 20 percent today. If it fails to take action, Germany will be stuck with the heaviest corporate tax burden among industrialized countries.

Tax competition and declining corporate income tax (CIT) rates are not new phenomena. However, over the past 30 years, the United States has been an outlier in not reducing tax rates Combined with the worldwide system of taxation, this is widely regarded as having served as an anchor to world CIT rates. Now the United States has cut its rate by 14 percentage points to 26 percent (21 percent excluding state taxes), which is close to the OECD member average of 24 percent (Figure 1). Combined with the (partial) shift toward territoriality, this may intensify tax competition. …Given the combination of highly mobile capital and source-based corporate income taxation, pressures on tax systems are not surprising. …The most clear-cut, and possibly largest, spillovers are still likely to be caused by the cut in the tax rate. …Depending on parameter assumptions, we find that reform will lead to average revenue losses of between 1.5 and 13.5 percent of the MNE tax base. …The paper has also discussed the likely policy reactions of other countries. …tax rates elsewhere also fall (by on average around 4 percentage points based on tentative estimates).

And I could add a third reason. The IMF confesses that we have even more evidence of the Laffer Curve.

So far, despite falling tax rates, CIT revenues have held up relatively well.

Game, set, match.

I’m very irked by what Trump is doing on trade, government spending, and cronyism, but I give credit where credit is due. I suspect none of the other Republicans who ran in 2016 would have brought the federal corporate tax rate all the way down to 21 percent. And I’m immensely enjoying how politicians in other nations feel pressure to do likewise.